DOCFORGE-BENCH: A Comprehensive 0-shot Benchmark for Document Forgery Detection and Analysis
Authors: Zengqi Zhao, Weidi Xia, En Wei, Yan Zhang, Jane Mo, Tiannan Zhang, Yuanqin Dai, Zexi Chen, Yiran Tao, Simiao Ren
Organizations: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · University of California, Irvine · Washington University in St. Louis · Duke University · University of California, Davis · New York University · Georgetown University
We present DOCFORGE-BENCH, the first unified zero-shot benchmark for document forgery detection, evaluating 14 methods across eight datasets spanning text tampering, receipt forgery, and identity document manipulation. Unlike fine-tuning-oriented evaluations such as ForensicHub [Du et al., 2025], DOCFORGE-BENCH applies all methods with their published pretrained weights and no domain adaptation -- a deliberate design choice that reflects the realistic deployment scenario where practitioners lack labeled document training data. Our central finding is a pervasive calibration failure invisible under single-threshold protocols: methods achieve moderate Pixel-AUC (>=0.76) yet near-zero Pixel-F1. This AUC-F1 gap is not a discrimination failure but a score-distribution shift: tampered regions occupy only 0.27-4.17% of pixels in document images -- an order of magnitude less than in natural image benchmarks -- making the standard tau=0.5 threshold catastrophically miscalibrated. Oracle-F1 is 2-10x higher than fixed-threshold Pixel-F1, confirming that calibration, not representation, is the bottleneck. A controlled calibration experiment validates this: adapting a single threshold on N=10 domain images recovers 39-55% of the Oracle-F1 gap, demonstrating that threshold adaptation -- not retraining -- is the key missing step for practical deployment. Overall, no evaluated method works reliably out-of-the-box on diverse document types, underscoring that document forgery detection remains an unsolved problem. We further note that all eight datasets predate the era of generative AI editing; benchmarks covering diffusion- and LLM-based document forgeries represent a critical open gap on the modern attack surface.
Figures & tables
Dataset
Domain
Year
Dataset Size
Eval. Images
Forgery Types
GT Masks
Used In
DocTamper
Document
2023
∼ 170K
1,000 (sampled) †
Text replace/insert/delete
✓
Both
T-SROIE
Receipt
2022
360
360
Text tampering
✓
Both
RealTextManip.
Real-world
2022
9K
1,000 (sampled) †
Text manipulation
✓
Both
Tampered-IC13
Scene text
2015
233
188 tampered
Text replacement
BBox ∗
Both
Receipt Forgery
Receipt
2023
988
35 forged
Price/qty forgery
BBox ∗
Both
MixTamper
Document
2024
∼ 30K
1,000 (sampled) †
Copy-move, splice, gen., smear, erase
✓(RGB)
Both
Table 1: Overview of the eight document datasets evaluated in DocForge-Bench . The Eval. Images column shows the number of images used in our evaluation (see footnote for sampling details). ∗ Receipt Forgery and Tampered-IC13 provide bounding-box annotations; pixel masks are rasterized for localization evaluation.
#
Method
Year
Venue
Category
Framework
I/O
General image forensics
1
TruFor
2023
CVPR
Image forensics
PyTorch
Image → mask + score
2
ManTraNet
2019
CVPR
Image forensics
Keras/TF
Image → heatmap
3
MVSS-Net
2021
ICCV
Image forensics
PyTorch
Image → mask + edge
4
CAT-Net
2022
IJCV
JPEG forensics
PyTorch
JPEG → mask
5
PSCC-Net
2022
TCSVT
Image forensics
PyTorch
Image → mask + score
Table 2: Overview of methods catalogued in DocForge-Bench .
Figure 1: Pixel-F1 (left) and Pixel-AUC (right) for all 14 evaluated methods—document-specific (above separator) and general forensic (below)—across eight document datasets. Pixel-AUC is consistently moderate to high while Pixel-F1 at fixed τ=0.5 remains near zero for most (method, dataset) pairs. The pervasive AUC–F1 gap confirms calibration failure—not discriminative failure—as the dominant bottleneck: methods correctly rank tampered pixels above authentic ones but cannot identify a usable decision threshold in the document domain. ForensicHub methods (FFDN, CAFTB, TIFDM) achieve AUC > 0.90 on multiple datasets where Pixel-F1 is below 0.05, confirming the calibration gap is not resolved by document-specific training. Appendix Fig. 6 shows Pixel-IoU and Oracle F1.
Method
Mean F1
σ
Mean AUC
Document-specific
CAFTB-Net
0.34
0.33
0.85
DocTamper
0.30
0.31
0.81
ASCFormer
0.27
0.21
0.63
TIFDM
0.24
0.22
0.83
ADCD-Net
0.23
0.23
0.79
Table 3: Per-method summary: mean Pixel-F1 and Pixel-AUC across all seven datasets. σ = standard deviation of Pixel-F1 across datasets (consistency).
Figure 2: Mean cross-domain Pixel-F1 (left) and Pixel-AUC (right) for all 14 methods across the four cross-domain datasets (RealTextManipulation, Tampered-IC13, ReceiptForgery, FSTS-1.5k). Error bars show standard deviation. The dashed vertical line marks the mean across all general methods. Despite document-specific training, CAFTB-Net is the only doc-specific method that clearly outperforms both TruFor and CAT-Net on F1; on AUC, the two method families overlap substantially, confirming that calibration—not feature discrimination—distinguishes the groups.
Figure 6Figure 7
Figure 5: Calibration failure across all 14 methods: Pixel-F1 @ τ=0.5 (dark blue), Oracle F1 at best threshold (light blue), and Pixel-AUC (green), all averaged across the eight document datasets. The consistent ordering AUC ≫ Oracle F1 > Pixel-F1 holds for every method, confirming that score-distribution shift—not feature discrimination—is the primary bottleneck. A dashed vertical line separates document-specific (left) from general methods (right).
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 6: Pixel-IoU (left) and Oracle F1 (right) for all 14 evaluated methods across eight document datasets. Pixel-IoU tracks Pixel-F1 closely ( IoU=F1/(2−F1) ) and is included for comparison with prior work. Oracle F1 is the best achievable F1 at any threshold per image; the large gap between Oracle F1 and the fixed-threshold Pixel-F1 in Fig. 1 quantifies calibration error across the document domain.
Method
Type
DocTamper
T-SROIE
RTM
IC13
Receipt
FantasyID
MixTamper
FSTS-1.5k
DocTamper
Doc †
0.914
0.045
0.035
0.185
0.015
0.107
0.604
0.475
DTD (FH)
Doc †
0.682
0.021
0.024
0.140
0.003
0.036
0.106
0.242
FFDN
Doc †
0.736
0.043
0.025
0.156
0.019
0.068
0.072
0.219
CAFTB-Net
Doc †
0.893
0.048
0.039
0.170
0.023
0.213
0.676
0.671
TIFDM
Doc †
0.742 ‡
0.046
0.042
0.164
0.019
0.300
0.312
0.320
ASCFormer
Doc †
0.180
0.779
0.265
0.022
0.260
0.222
0.314
0.133
Appendix
Table 4: Document-specific ( † ) vs. general forensic methods on 8 document datasets (zero-shot). Pixel-F1 scores (higher is better); best per column in bold . Full metrics (AUC, IoU) available in the benchmark repository. ‡ TIFDM DocTamper result may be in-domain; see Appendix B .
Method
Type
DocTamper
T-SROIE
RTM
IC13
Receipt
FantasyID
FSTS-1.5k
AUC
Opt-F1
AUC
Opt-F1
AUC
Opt-F1
AUC
Opt-F1
AUC
Opt-F1
AUC
Opt-F1
AUC
Opt-F1
DocTamper
Doc †
0.995
0.942
0.811
0.078
0.660
0.068
0.748
0.312
0.731
0.037
0.754
0.167
0.877
0.630
DTD (FH)
Doc †
0.988
0.786
0.872
0.106
0.730
0.092
0.857
0.335
0.813
0.046
0.853
0.218
0.730
0.347
FFDN
Doc †
0.991
0.806
0.904
0.155
0.741
0.090
0.895
0.352
0.842
0.088
0.880
0.307
0.736
0.337
CAFTB-Net
Doc †
0.995
0.906
0.810
0.060
0.704
0.050
0.845
0.206
0.791
0.031
0.796
0.246
0.885
0.695
TIFDM
Doc †
0.994
0.813
0.806
0.076
0.719
0.071
0.788
0.277
0.762
0.037
0.879
0.348
0.792
0.417
Appendix
Table 5: Pixel-AUC (threshold-independent) and Oracle F1 for all evaluated methods. High AUC with low F1 reveals calibration failure independent of domain specificity.
Figure 7: Distribution of Pixel-F1 across eight datasets per method, shown as horizontal box plots sorted by median (descending). Individual dataset scores are overlaid as jittered points. Red methods are document-specific; blue are general forensics. The wide interquartile ranges confirm that no method generalises uniformly: a method can have the highest median while still scoring near zero on at least two datasets.
Figure 8: Pixel-F1 performance profiles for all 14 methods across eight datasets sorted by best-method F1 (descending difficulty left to right). Document-specific methods are shown as dashed lines; general methods as solid lines. The crossing of lines across datasets confirms that no single method dominates uniformly.
Method
Val. Dataset
Ours
Ours
Ours
Published
Source
Notes
Pixel-F1
AUC
Opt-F1
(metric = value)
TruFor
CASIAv1
0.687
0.946
0.789
AUC = 0.793; Opt-F1 = 0.715
Guillaro et al. [2023] (CVPR 2023)
Our AUC and Opt-F1 exceed the paper; same split, higher results consistent with implementation correctness.
MVSS-Net
CASIAv1
0.451
0.845
0.575
AUC = 0.862 ‡
Chen et al. [2021] (ICCV 2021)
2 pp gap attributable to CASIAv1 vs. CASIAv1 + split difference; result is consistent.
PSCC-Net
IMD2020
0.132
0.708
0.326
Pixel-F1 = 0.203 (pretrained)
Liu et al. [2022] (TCSVT 2022)
Both use frozen pretrained weights; 7 pp gap within the expected range for random sampling differences and test-set version.
IML-ViT
CASIAv1
0.694
0.942
0.776
AUC = 0.836; Opt-F1 = 0.761
Ma et al. [2023] (arXiv 2023)
Our numbers exceed the paper on both metrics, confirming correct implementation.
CAT-Net
CASIAv1
0.710
0.959
0.809
AUC = 0.976; Opt-F1 = 0.781
Kwon et al. [2022] (IJCV 2022)
1.7 pp AUC gap; Opt-F1 slightly higher. Consistent with test-split variation reported across reproductions.
Appendix
Table 6: Validation of general image forensic methods against published benchmarks. Metrics computed on official test splits; CASIAv1 uses the standard (non-augmented) split. “Published” column reports the closest metric from the original paper or a reference reproduction; ‡ denotes results on CASIAv1 + (augmented) rather than CASIAv1.
Method
Val. Dataset
Ours
Published
Source
Protocol
Notes
Pixel-F1
Pixel-F1
DocTamper (model)
DocTamper test
0.914
0.914
Qu et al. [2023a] (CVPR 2023)
In-domain pretrained
Exact match to published figure.
ADCD-Net
DocTamper test
0.762
0.806
Wong et al. [2025] (ICCV 2025)
In-domain pretrained
4 pp gap; attributable to our 1,000-image sample cap vs. full test set evaluation.
FFDN
DocTamper test
0.736
0.821
Du et al. [2025] (NeurIPS 2025)
Fine-tuned on DocTamper
Our frozen weights trail fine-tuned result by 8.5 pp, which is expected.
DTD
DocTamper test
0.682
0.803
Du et al. [2025] (NeurIPS 2025)
Fine-tuned on DocTamper
Our frozen weights trail fine-tuned result by 12 pp, which is expected.
CAFTB-Net
DocTamper test
0.893
0.328
Du et al. [2025] (NeurIPS 2025)
Retrained from scratch on DocTamper
Our result exceeds the ForensicHub baseline because the original CAFTB-Net weights were already pretrained on DocTamper; ForensicHub trains from scratch.
Appendix
Table 7: Validation of document-specific methods against published benchmarks. All evaluations use frozen pretrained weights (zero-shot protocol). “Published” column reports the closest comparable number from the source paper; where the source uses fine-tuning or retraining, this is noted explicitly.
We present AIForge-Doc, the first dedicated benchmark targeting exclusively diffusion-model-based inpainting in financial and form documents with pixel-level annotation. Existing document forgery datasets rely on traditional digital editing tools (e.g., Adobe Photoshop, GIMP), creating a critical gap: state-of-the-art detectors are blind to the rapidly growing threat of AI-forged document fraud. AIForge-Doc addresses this gap by systematically forging numeric fields in real-world receipt and form images using two AI inpainting APIs -- Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and Ideogram v2 Edit -- yielding 4,061 forged images from four public document datasets (CORD, WildReceipt, SROIE, XFUND) across nine languages, annotated with pixel-precise tampered-region masks in DocTamper-compatible format. We benchmark three representative detectors -- TruFor, DocTamper, and a zero-shot GPT-4o judge -- and find that all existing methods degrade substantially: TruFor achieves AUC=0.751 (zero-shot, out-of-distribution) vs. AUC=0.96 on NIST16; DocTamper achieves AUC=0.563 vs. AUC=0.98 in-distribution, with pixel-level IoU=0.020; GPT-4o achieves only 0.509 -- essentially at chance -- confirming that AI-forged values are indistinguishable to automated detectors and VLMs. These results demonstrate that AIForge-Doc represents a qualitatively new and unsolved challenge for document forensics.
Jiaqi Wu, Yuchen Zhou, Muduo Xu +6
Duke University · New York University · University of North Carolina +1
OpenAI's GPT-Image-2 has effectively erased the visual boundary between authentic and AI-edited document images: a single number on a receipt can be replaced in under a second for a few cents. We release AIForge-Doc v2, a paired dataset of 3,066 GPT-Image-2 document forgeries with pixel-precise masks in DocTamper-compatible format, and benchmark four lines of defence: human inspectors (N=120, n=365 pair-votes via the public 2AFC site CanUSpotAI.com), TruFor (generic forensic), DocTamper (qcf-568, document-specific), and the same GPT-Image-2 model as a zero-shot self-judge -- asked, to avoid the trivial "image is mostly real" reading, whether any region was generated or edited by an AI image model. Human 2AFC accuracy is 0.501, indistinguishable from chance: even side-by-side, inspectors cannot tell GPT-Image-2 receipt forgeries from authentic counterparts. The three computational judges sit only modestly above (TruFor 0.599, DocTamper 0.585, self-judge 0.532). The self-judge fails consistently, not by chance: across five prompt strategies and four policies for handling ambiguous responses, AUC never rises above 0.59. To rule out the possibility that the two forensic detectors are broken on our source domain rather than blind to AI inpainting, we calibrate each on a same-domain traditional-tampering set built for its training distribution: TruFor reaches AUC 0.962 on cross-camera splicing of our dataset, DocTamper reaches 0.852 on cross-document OCR-token splicing with two-pass JPEG re-encoding. Both retain near-published performance on traditional tampering; switching to GPT-Image-2 inpainting drops AUC by 0.27-0.36 (0.962->0.599 TruFor; 0.852->0.585 DocTamper), isolating a detection gap specific to GPT-Image-2 inpainting. We release the dataset, pipeline, four-judge protocol, and calibration sets.
The rapid progress of generative AI has enabled increasingly realistic text-centric image forgeries, posing major challenges to document safety. Existing forensic methods mainly rely on visual cues and lack evidence-based reasoning to reveal subtle text manipulations. Detection, localization, and explanation are often treated as isolated tasks, limiting reliability and interpretability. To tackle these challenges, we propose DocShield, the first unified framework formulating text-centric forgery analysis as a visual-logical co-reasoning problem. At its core, a novel Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism enables implicit agentic reasoning, iteratively cross-validating visual anomalies with textual semantics to produce consistent, evidence-grounded forensic analysis. We further introduce a Weighted Multi-Task Reward for GRPO-based optimization, aligning reasoning structure, spatial evidence, and authenticity prediction. Complementing the framework, we construct RealText-V1, a multilingual dataset of document-like text images with pixel-level manipulation masks and expert-level textual explanations. Extensive experiments show DocShield significantly outperforms existing methods, improving macro-average F1 by 41.4% over specialized frameworks and 23.4% over GPT-4o on T-IC13, with consistent gains on the challenging T-SROIE benchmark. Our dataset, model, and code will be publicly released.
Fanwei Zeng, Changtao Miao, Jing Huang +8
Ant Group · Nanyang Technological University · CFAR and IHPC, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore